SilkParasite APT Hits Central Asian Governments With 7 RATs

Bitdefender Labs identified a China-nexus cyberespionage cluster dubbed SilkParasite that used seven RAT families to target government bodies across Central Asia (about 65 observed infections). Operators used spear-phishing with malicious Office documents, password-protected RAR lures, DLL sideloading with rotated signed hosts, and cloud-based C2 (Google Drive) to evade detection; researchers also observed artifacts consistent with AI-assisted development and found attribution signals pointing to a China-linked infrastructure and UTC+8 operator time zone.